Some thoughts...

Commentary on Dave Green's conversation with Rod Dreher

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On my drive home from work yesterday I got around to watching the recent conversation between

Dave Greene

and Rod Dreher hosted by Benjamin Boyce called How Libs & Cons Fail Young Men. It’s rather short and amicable, if a bit frustrating, I’ll link it below so you can give it a listen. After finishing it I wanted to put down a few thoughts on the topic discussed. The question of how we should approach disaffected young men looking for answers is one that we have discussed in passing several times on The Black Ibis Society show, and one that, while I might not have the answers to, believe is of the highest import, and needs to be addressed by all of us on our side of the conversation.

For those of you unfamiliar with the participants in the above video, Dave Greene, a man I very much respect, is a fellow writer, video essayist, YouTuber, and Substacker, who has been a strong pillar in the online dissident or whatever it is called now right-wing community. If you are interested in levelheaded intellectual takes I highly recommend his YouTube channel TheDistributist.

Rod Dreher is the much more mainstream and well-known of the two. He is an international journalist and writer, best known for his time spent writing for The American Conservative and his bestselling book The Benedict Option. He is a former Roman Catholic who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy and is a recent expatriate living in Hungary. Just like Dave, he writes here on Substack. His latest book, which I own but won’t comment on because I haven’t had the chance to read, is Living in Wonder.

The topic of the conversation, what it was about, is the problem with established conservative institutions and how they fail to appeal to or support young men, of any political persuasion, but most importantly, young conservative men. Because both Dave Greene and Rod Dreher are deeply religious men, the core of the conversation was predominantly about how modern Christian churches and Christian institutions fail young men looking for something more in their lives.

I’m going to start by saying that Dave Green, throughout the entire conversation, was polite and amicable, he pressed Dreher without rudeness and didn’t raise the temperature of the discussion until the very end. Unfortunately, I lack that level of poise and eloquence, so I’m going to be a bit blunter, the modern Christian establishment in the United States has done nothing for young men and more often than not has outright harmed and held them back.

Before I continue, I want to preempt some concerns that I expect to crop up in my comments. Yes, of course, I understand that your fundamentalist Baptist congregation or your local parish is awesome and that you are super based and do all sorts of cool masculine things. That’s amazing. I have no concerns about the church I recently started attending. But your unique, one-off example, does not negate the truth that as a whole modern institutional Christianity has failed to guide and mentor, or even address the critical issues, held by young white men. This, undisputed to me fact, I’ve observed with my own eyes at the Protestant church I attended as a teenager over twenty years ago and I’ve heard about it ad nauseum from young men for the past two decades. If you don’t believe what is being discussed is a serious problem then I urge you to stop reading at this point and wish you Godspeed in your spiritual and political life, because you are blessed and fortunate to not even be aware of the difficulties faced by a generation of young and middle-aged men who share your faith.

The truth, illustrated by statistic after statistic, and seen by our own two eyes, is that young people, specifically young men, are in dire straits in today's America. White young men suffer from a rate of disaffection, drug use, joblessness, despair, and suicide never seen in Western society. The previous generations, tasked by tradition, to mentor, guide, and protect the young have failed, or even downright abandoned, their duty, and in return, so many young men have turned to guidance from online pornographer pimps or worse, degenerated into a hateful pit of drugs, despair, and self-abuse, often culminating in violence towards others or themselves.

Young men need help, and guidance, and need something to belong to, but almost all communities seem to have turned their back to them. Our education system has been predominantly focused on the development of girls and minorities, downright ignoring young white men, and worse, actively discriminating against them on school admissions and scholarships. I don’t even have to go into detail listing examples of the blatant injustice faced by young men, from the downright refusal to even consider them in the American publishing world to the ongoing replacement by cheap foreign labor. One could write volumes on the challenges young men face today.

Church communities should be a refuge from this world. A place to get spiritual answers and guidance for the next but also a place where a young man can get guidance and support to navigate this world, because without healthy young men, there will not be a future, there will not be families, and there will not be a church. Yet, time and time again the concerns of young men are ignored or worse yet silenced. Where is the mainstream answer to young white men being murdered in cold blood? I have not once seen a white protestant church stand by and support a victim of interracial crime. Yet, time and time again, every black murderer is flanked by his church community. What I have seen, time and time again is white congregations expelling young men for what they deem unsavory opinions, the opinions that are often silently held by many members, too afraid to voice them aloud.  

The church is spiritual, and the main purpose is the praise of God and to help its members spiritually towards that goal, but the congregation, the community around the church is secular and has to address the secular concerns of its members, something that as a whole seems to be woefully neglected.

Young men today have serious problems. Relationships between sexes when it comes to building relationships, marriages, and families are disastrously damaged, perverted, and distorted by online dating, pornography, and newly accepted progressive social norms that are leading to a lack of young relationships and a dearth of marriage with the result of diminished family formation and children. The job market, specifically for young men, is woeful with open blatant discrimination in college acceptance, job listings, and promotions. Crime and violence, especially aimed towards young white men is often unevenly policed and punished.

What is the older generations' response to these significant problems that are often spiritual, political, and cultural in nature? Often the answer is nothing, a polite silence. Other times is condemnation and expulsion as in the case of the X account Captive Dreamer, who after being doxxed, had his father, the leader of a protestant congregation denounce his son in public. Captive Dreamer is a prime example of a young guy who most likely got nothing out of his religious community and turned to extreme online posting, while unpalatable to the norm, a public denunciation by his father and spiritual congregation is distasteful in my opinion, more so in the light of recent events when a young black kid murdered a white kid in broad daylight and his community rallied behind him, not denouncing him for the murder, but instead glorifying him. This of course is not the only example, we can look back a few years to Ryan Turnipseed facing excommunication from his Lutheran church for opposing liberal ideology. While the two examples are well known in the online right sphere, I am convinced many more examples exist, and worse of all for every known example there are thousands of young men who don’t feel confident enough to share their views and turn their backs on a church that isn’t welcoming of them.

What do young men, white young men, in particular, have to gain from joining and devoting themselves to a contemporary congregation? No answers or even acknowledgment about the relationship and family issues in modernity. No support against the blatant institutional discrimination and failing career market. No guidance and support against the hostile anti-white, misandrist, and anti-American cultural tides in the country. But often the same elderly congregation is quick to condemn, denounce, and expel.

So the question to Rod Dreher is a simple one. What are the churches doing to address the spiritual, cultural, and political concerns of young white men? Men, who are often drowning in a sea of despair and spiritual neglect. Where are the programs? The groups? The outreach? The community support? Where are the answers? Better yet, where is even the faintest attempt at acknowledging the issues plaguing a significant required to maintain a healthy community?